1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of manufacturing a multilayer ceramic capacitor and to a multilayer ceramic capacitor.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, with miniaturization of electronic devices, such as cellular phones, personal computers, digital cameras, and digital audio devices, a great demand has emerged for reduced size and increased capacity of multilayer ceramic capacitors incorporated in the electronic devices.
A potential method of increasing the capacity of a multilayer ceramic capacitor without increasing its size is a method of increasing the area where internal electrodes face each other. One such example method of increasing the area where internal electrodes face each other is described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 6-13259. This method includes producing a green chip in which both of first and second internal electrodes are exposed at each of first and second side surfaces and then forming a ceramic layer on each of the first and second side surfaces.
Unfortunately, for the method described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 6-13259, if a ceramic layer between the first and second internal electrodes is thin, the first and second internal electrodes may be short-circuited. To address this issue, it is difficult for the ceramic layer to have a sufficiently small thickness, it is thus necessary to reduce the number of stacked layers with the aim of reducing the size, and an increase in the capacity is hard to achieve. Accordingly, a small high-capacity multilayer ceramic capacitor is difficult to obtain.